by Jack Dann
By then it was getting near closing time, so I checked out several anthologies of early nineteenth century poetry to myself. Returning home on the Underground, I discovered that Elizabeth Crossen was not best known as an early romantic poet, but a pioneer of the Gothic style. In the years leading up to 1809 her works grew increasingly dark in tone, and she often wrote of being ‘courted by death’. Anthology introductions spoke of her suitors having an extraordinarily high mortality rate, but her marriage to Robert Bell had given her a last chance for happiness. With Robert she had been lucky. He was mentioned as being from a noble family, but working as an assistant to a magistrate ‘for the common goode.’ He had abandoned this career for his poetry after marrying Elizabeth.
I was so intrigued that I not only missed my station, I missed it by eight stops.
The following morning saw me in the British Library’s reading rooms at St Pancras, and by lunchtime I was in the nearby bookshops. I arrived at the municipal library with my own copies of all five biographies of Elizabeth Crossen, along with several books of her poetry. I had even memorised her most famous work, ‘Death is a Gentleman in Love’. The poem described a shadowy figure that stalked her in the shadows, jealously taking the lives of anyone bold enough to court her.
Literary authorities were unanimous that this was her finest work, and some Gothic scholars even lamented the beginning of her liaison with Bell because it brightened her mood. Others argued that she had done more good with her later pastoral works, because she had gone on to promote the glories of the English countryside at a time when it was under threat from industrialisation. I found myself even developing an empathy for Bell as well as his wife. After all, we were both refugees from law enforcement.
Those who have not worked in forensics can never appreciate how very attuned one becomes to a case. Every detail becomes worthy of investigation, because important clues can never be anticipated. Thus it was that I decided to review the security tapes from the cameras in the library. There were several cameras, all feeding into old-style video cassette tapes, and these were rotated every three days. I had hoped to catch a good view of Mister Brandel, in particular his face. I was disappointed. He appeared on only two tapes, because all other cameras had been moved to the hidden corners of the book stacks. At that time we were trying to catch the Phantom Crapper, who was touring the municipal libraries of London and leaving steaming hot turds in secluded areas.
In a strange way I was very relieved to see Mister Brandel on the tape of the information desk, because it confirmed him to be real. Everything was as I remembered it, however, and I learned nothing. On the tape from the library entrance he appeared four times. These were images of him that I had not seen, so even though they did not provide a better view of his face, I stared at them intently. I could even see myself sitting at the information desk in the background, for the camera was trained on people leaving the library. This was to catch customers leaving with stolen goods. I saw Mister Brandel collecting his folder from me, then approaching the camera. The inner glass doors slid aside, he walked through … and I remained dimly visible as he passed between me and the camera!
Several dozen viewings later I had established that the library’s most intriguing borrower had started fading as he had passed through the inner doors. Were he really from the first decade of the nineteenth century, he would not know about cameras. Amid everything that did not make sense, here was consistency at last.
For the rest of that evening I studied trends in clothing from around 1800. It was a time of transition for men’s fashions in England, influenced heavily by George Brummel. Being a favourite of the Prince Regent, Brummel’s opinions were taken seriously. He had established trends to personal hygiene, wearing clean clothes, and the abandoning of wigs and hair powder for more natural grooming. In general, the lighter colours of the late eighteenth century were giving way to dark green, sombre brown, and even black. Mister Brandel’s wig and beaver hat were a little old fashioned for the early 1800s, but his long, dark garrick overcoat with its high collar was certainly in period. Slowly I established a profile for him. He was not overly conscious of fashion, and even lagged a little behind in some matters of style, but generally he made an effort to blend in. He did not have a stale, unwashed reek about him, which fitted in with Brummel’s decrees on washing being fashionable.
It was while having dinner that I realised Mister Brandel was a serial killer.
For the next week I resented every reference enquiry from every library customer as I researched Mister Brandel and everything associated with him. Edwin Charles Brandel had worked for the East India Company, although his occupation was merely given as ‘agent’. The scanty records about him showed that he had been in India in the 1780s and 90s, and had returned to England a rich man. This would have put his age at no less than forty when he had begun his peculiar, anonymous association with Elizabeth Crossen in 1803. She had been seventeen then.
Mister Brandel’s father had been knighted for his part in the British Admiralty’s project to develop highly accurate clocks to help ships’ navigators calculate longitude. His brother William had taught natural philosophy at Oxford University. William’s single published paper was on the mathematics of time. In it he argued how time was really a branch of optics, and could be intensified, reflected back upon itself, and even focussed into the future. The paper had been published as a monograph in 1792, and William had died in 1803. No indication was given of what he had discovered or developed in his last eleven years. Edwin Brandel had returned from India in the year of his death.
The more I learned, the more fearful I became. Mister Brandel was a rich man from an upper class military family, and his brother had made studies into the nature of time and optics that were wildly at odds with both contemporary and subsequent scientific theory. After his brother had died, Mister Brandel became obsessed with a pretty, intelligent and vivacious young woman less than half his age. There was evidence for his involvement in the murders of fourteen of her suitors between 1803 and 1809.
What can one do about a serial killer from two hundred years in the past who is researching his victims in one’s library? My work in forensics had been with associative evidence, that is, trawling databases and finding links between apparently unrelated facts. I was sure of myself… yet the police would be sure to treat my suspicions as a joke. Even if they did take me seriously, I doubted that they could do anything about Mister Brandel. He could vanish at will, and apparently he could also travel through time. By the look of his notes, he had done quite a lot of research in other libraries. Why was he now in mine? Had he murdered other librarians for becoming too suspicious? I was not a man of action. I had never fired a gun, I did not jog, I did not have so much as a yellow belt in karate. Whatever I did would have to be alone, and it could certainly not involve a confrontation.
I began to steal odd items on visits to other libraries, and after years of shunning the use of computers at home I bought my first PC, printer and scanner. Most significantly, I arranged lunch with my friend Harriet, who was a failed writer who refused to stop writing. It was usually Harriet who contacted me about our occasional dates, but now I needed her. She was not so much my ally against Mister Brandel, she was more of a weapon.
Harriet had a private income, so she was able to indulge her passion for writing detective fiction. Her style would have been acceptable in the 1930s, so had she been writing eighty years earlier she might have made a name for herself. This was 2010, however, so she was let down by her overblown prose, simple plots, minimal grasp of police procedures, and characters with about as much depth as a car park puddle. Nevertheless she had nine books in print, which had sold three or four hundred copies each. Out of loyalty I had bought copies of all nine, then bought another set which I had donated to my library.
‘Look, it’s the same old story,’ said Harriet when I enquired about how her sales were coming along. ‘Getting in print, easy peasey, you can go from for
matted file to book-in-hand in a working week if you know who and how. Promotion? Hey, I do all the FM local shows and writers’ centres, so people know. After that you have three problems. People know about the book, they want to buy the book, but now it’s distribution, distribution, distribution.’
‘So, the distributors still won’t distribute?’ I asked.
‘Not even if I pay, and I’ve offered to do that.’
‘I bet that doesn’t stop you.’
‘Stop me? Hah! Since I’ve been selling directly from my web site, sales have gone up fifteen percent. That’s still only sixty two books more, but I’ve used another trick to get sales over five hundred — sort of.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s a bit of a fiddle, but it works. I do a scooter tour of all the big bookshops with remainder tables, taking a couple of copies of my latest into each place. I pretend to look through what’s on offer, leave my books on the table, and when I go nobody notices that I’ve got two less books than I came in with.’
‘You smuggle your books into bookshops?’
‘Hey, why not? When the system screws you then it’s time to screw the system.’
Harriet was as predictable as the sunrise, at least to someone from forensics. The word ‘screw’ had been spoken. That was highly significant, and meant she was in the mood.
‘So, how is the next book going?’ I asked. ‘Do you think number ten will score a thousand copies sold?’
‘Oh man, as if. How I would love to say “sales in four figures”. Er, speaking of the next book, would you like to be in a little research project?’
‘I’ll do what I can, the library’s resources are at your disposal.’
‘Er, well, it’s actually a bit more hands on than that.’
That night after work I knocked at Harriet’s door at 11pm, and was greeted by a woman in a dark blue skirt suit with padded shoulders, wearing a beret, and with the most luridly crimson lipstick that I have ever set eyes upon.
‘Harriet?’
‘Hey, come in, come in, it’s 1945 and I’m a spy, wouldn’t you know it?’
Harriet was researching a seduction scene in which she was a spy and I was a British scientist with secrets that she wanted. Neither of us smoked, so naturally when we lit up the first cigarettes to enter her unit in decades, her smoke detector went off and we both had coughing fits. To give her credit, she had researched the dinner, drinks and clothing of 1945 very thoroughly. I was sent into her bathroom to change into underwear that even my grandfather would have thought a bit dated, and over all this went a genuine 1945 shirt, tie and suit. I emerged feeling very self-conscious.
I am not entirely sure what Harriet got out of the encounter. Once drinks, dinner and banter were over, we both had quite a lot of trouble coping with a seduction that involved suspenders, braces, a fly with buttons, and all the other intricacies of archaic underwear. I tried to point out that real 1945 characters would have handled all that with the ease of experience, but Harriet did not agree. She maintained that the British scientist was meant to be inexperienced with removing female clothing.
We moved on to the act of lovemaking while partially clothed in 1945 fashions. This got off to a bad start when Harriet was hit in the face by my braces, then took a turn for the worse when one of my fly buttons got caught in a suspender strap. About three hours after I had arrived, we were at last fully divested of the clothing of 1945, seduced several time over, and drifting away to sleep.
Although my wife was by now nine years dead, and although this had not been my first experience of Harriet’s literary researches, I still felt unease at being with someone else. Over and over I told myself that Emily was dead, and that this particular exercise was to save another life. Emily had been a policewoman, she had died in a shootout, and there was nothing that I could have done. We all have to fight in our own ways and with our own weapons, and this was my way of defending the innocent and defeating darkness. Sleep claimed me while I argued with my conscience.
It was the following morning that I had really come for. I did not start work until the midafternoon, and Harriet did not work at all. Thus I had roughly six hours free to spend with her.
‘Harriet, I wonder if you would help me with a little project of my own?’ I asked as we sat drinking coffee to the sound of London commuting to work outside.
Mister Brandel arrived in the library at three weeks to the very minute from our previous meeting. Instead of going to the stacks he came straight to the reference desk. I cannot describe his manner as nervous, so much as brisk and confident. Yes, his clothing was two hundred years out of date, but his manner made up for that. Look as if you belong, act as if your presence is beyond challenge, and everyone but a trained security guard will accept even a substantial degree of strangeness in your clothes.
‘Three weeks have passed, I must have my reserved books,’ he said, as if he had only left the library moments earlier.
I looked up at him, hoping that my smile did not look too forced. I very nearly called him Mister Brandel, but caught myself in time.
‘Mister Goldsmith, I have your biographies of Elizabeth Crossen, but I’m afraid there was a problem,’ I explained.
‘You have my books but there was a problem?’ he asked, frowning.
‘I had to get them in from Nunhead on inter-library loan. The student who borrowed our own copies has not returned them as yet.’
‘You — but you do have the books?’
‘Oh yes, I knew you have a keen interest in Elizabeth Crossen’s life, and I noticed that your time here seems to be limited, so I did not want you to be disappointed. I had them sent here only an hour ago. They are the latest editions.’
I could see the relief in Mister Brandel’s face, even though not much of his face was actually visible.
‘That is very kind of you,’ he whispered. ‘Such kindness is all too rare.’
Pausing only to check that the books were the same titles that he wanted, he hurried over to the reading tables, opened his folder, laid his pen across it, and picked up the first book.
Sweat trickled from my armpits and ran down my rib cage. The man was a killer, quite possibly he had been an assassin for the East India Company. He could travel through time, meaning that he could move about at will and kill with impunity, whether in the nineteenth or twenty-first centuries. He was clearly obsessed with Elizabeth Crossen, and by now I was able to guess at his agenda. A time machine cannot make you young again, but it can allow you to travel to a time when your much younger beloved is closer to your own age. The only problem would be if she happened to marry someone in the meantime, but there were ways to deal with that as well.
Mister Brandel had conducted his strange courtship for six years now, and history had changed fourteen times as he assassinated his rivals. Two hundred years into his future, he had safely researched the details of the men that Elizabeth had married, then gone back and killed them. With each murder he changed history, clearing the way for yet another young rival. How long would this go on? He would probably spend only a few days or weeks in any year, so that Elizabeth would get older while his age virtually stood still. So far the age gap between them had narrowed by six years. What gap would he think to be suitable?
The man’s problem was that he was in love with the young Elizabeth. We all change with the experience of life, however. When Emily had been shot I had very nearly been destroyed. I had not dated anyone for seven years, and I had changed both job and career to escape the memories of losing her. When I was young I would never have dreamed of dating someone like Harriet, yet she was such a contrast with Emily that I was now willing to have at least a tenuous attachment with her. If our relationship was a farce, what was wrong with a farce? I needed a laugh, after all. For her part, Harriet was tired of men who wanted her to adjust to their expectations. Because I did not make demands upon her or try to keep her from her lovingly, if shoddily, written detective fiction, she chose to include me as a
small part of her life.
It took all of my willpower not to stare at Mister Brandel. He now had three books lying open on the reading table, and had just picked up a fourth. My past, it was coming to life. I had testified in court, dangerous people had learned just who had traced their guilt through convoluted database associations. Weeks later two hard, cold men had walked into the park where Emily and I were sitting, feeding the pigeons in the sunlight. I had been helpless, but she was an armed policewoman.
‘Got any more crumbs for the birds?’
They had been my last words to her before we saw the guns come out.
‘Run! I’ll cover!’
They had been her last words to me. I ran, crouching low. Nine shots barked out behind me, and by the time I looked back there were three bodies on the ground and a lot of onlookers screaming and fleeing.
Now it was I who was doing the defending. I had fired my shots, I had not run, but I still had to stand my ground. Mister Brandel was a killer. A killer from any other age still kills as dead. The thought almost made me laugh, but I could not afford to laugh. At some time in the distant past, and with a trail of dozens of corpses behind him, Mister Brandel would finally court and win an Elizabeth Crossen who was perhaps four decades old. She would be bitter from the twenty years of pain and loss caused by his murders. He would be disappointed with what she had become after so much waiting and effort. He would be a disappointed killer.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mister Brandel stand, straighten his coat, then walk from the reading table.
‘Oh Mister Goldsmith, you forgot your folder!’ I called as loudly as is proper in a library.
He stopped and turned. His eyes wandered here and there, as if he were confused about who might have spoken to him.
‘I am just to the privy, watch over my effects if you will,’ he said to me at last, then continued on his way.